You all know that the classic stats are mastery and critical rating for holy priest, right?
They have remained the same since Cata, which is when I started. Mastery, then crit.
However since versatility came out I’ve come to question the real value of crit for us. Our top heal in raids is always Echo of Light, which doesn’t crit.
I was watching a Mythic+ guide for Holy Priests which presented two builds: a strong echo/passive healing build with mastery + versatility and an aggressive haste+versa build for more damage.
However, most written guides say that dungeon stats are haste + crit. That’s when things become weird because it’s not easy to gauge whether 20% crit is better or worse than 20% extra versatility. It’s 20% extra healing and damage versus 20% chance to deal double damage or healing.
When you look at resto druids, the reason they are so good is because they can just leave dots and catweave for dps. Therefore, it makes more sense to use versatility instead of crit as a holy priest so our echo does the healing for us while we dps.
The sad thing is that in this expansion it is impossible to experiment because you just can’t change your corruptions whenever you want, and that’s extremely frustrating, having all this gear when you can’t test different builds.
Just to set an example, I’ll use my priest. I have 75% mastery, 34% crit and 8% versatility. I would rather have 30% versatility and 20% crit, or 25% versatility and 25% crit just to balance things out.
Versatility is a good stat in general. Not very interesting, but good.
Crit wins over Versatility because a critical heal is over double the value which results in double the echo of light healing. Versatility will buff both the healing of the heal and the echo, but the more often you double the initial heal, the better.
Holy priest mastery is terrible in any challenging M+ situation, relative to its usefulness in raiding.
In general we fall over dead against any threatening stiff breeze in M+ so you want a healthy amount of vers even in your weekly +15 key, if that’s your only goal. The rest just divide between crit and haste if you can. The first ensures you get some decent burst healing and the latter ensures that your cast time heals outside of flash don’t take 10 years to land, by the time which your friendly target is already dead.
For raid mastery is better. More HPS. For Mitic+ Crit and vers is so close in valor, crit has a small advantage in number of HPS, but the vers provide defensive valor. In high key the option for vers is better.
I have found that you just have to find a balance. Yes. I am Disc priest, but I was trying a versatility/haste build. Was good for the bottom line throughput, but I had to balance out my crit for the big heals. Just play around with it a bit til ya find your sweet spot.
While Echo of Light can’t crit, it nevertheless scales with crit since the underlying spells can crit, which creates a larger Echo.
And 100 points of critical strike will give you more crit%, than 100 versatility would give you vers%. The multiplier is different. This is why we prefer crit over vers.
It’s like 84 vers rating for 1% and 72 crit rating for 1%. Minimal difference.
Vers is better once you consider that it effects spells that can’t crit like Vitality Conduit, Desperate Prayer, Trinkets and the damage reduction. You also get more value out of vers amps because of C&S minor.
The major difference gameplay wise is that crit is RNG but vers is constant. You can fight a boss or a big trash pack and not crit any of your Power Words but that randomness isn’t a factor for vers.
It is a valid argument because the holy priest is the glass cannon healer. DP doesn’t count as a worthwhile defensive cooldown relative to something like barkskin on resto druid or fort brew on MW monk. Everyone’s #1 job in a group is staying alive. They cannot do their job to help others if they are dead.
This is further compounded by having terrible mobility in the holy priest. Since a holy priest has terrible baseline survivability you need to look to other areas like stats to stay alive.
I forgot. We ALSO have the worst armor of all healers and focused will won’t help you because if something is hitting you in melee, then you are already dead. There are plenty of dangerous unavoidable M+ abilities that are physical damage, such as the “powder shot” on eudora on second boss FH.
We’re like a 3/3 for being absolutely terrible at staying alive. I’m going to invest more time in this priest and get my vers up to 30-50%, just so I can survive unavoidable things that other healers can cooldown through. I’ll also throw in one of those cheap avoidance corruption pieces.
Just want to point out that vers , while good, is not the overall best to stack amps for on account of there not being any on your necklace nor cloak. C+S has ramp up time and can fall off so the vers amp from that Isn’t as consistent.
Vers does offer survivability of course, which is important. Long story short, use whatever works for you.
Full disclosure, I am not well versed/educated and up to date with Holy and Disc specs.
Having said that, I’d like to pitch something to see how possible it would be.
Since Holy is all about “throughput”, then what if any overhealing it does, it provides a 50/50 % of damage absorb and damage reduction for x sec. Then there can be a mastery which would grant increased damage reduction and damage absorb.
I am trying to think if this would be either useful or overpowered.
I was trying to take Holy’s strength and make it passively add to its weakness in pure survival-ability.